“We’re driving a mass extinction event,” according to Chris Packham in Episode five of the BBC’s Evolution series.
Humans have the capability to destroy themselves wholesale, through unconstrained, unending wars and through changes to the climate threatening our extinction.
Recent and ongoing wars in Ukraine, Iran, Gaza, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Kuwait, Syria, Iraq, Myanmar, and Sudan all derive in part from the megalomaniacal striving for personal power and wealth, often by just one or a small group of individuals. All can be described in hindsight at least as unnecessary. Millions of people have been killed, injured, and rendered homeless. It’s possible for any of these to spread into world war.
But the climate crisis is the biggest war of them all, threatening the extinction of the whole human race. This war began years ago, and now threatens to harm, engulf and eventually destroy us all.
Humans know how to destroy themselves and are currently engaged in doing so. Humans know how to make themselves extinct as a species. They also know very well how not to.
Climate change is conscious decision
We know, from personal experience, history, and accumulated knowledge, how dependent humans are on a climate that is amenable to human habitation.
The worst, naturally-caused climate crisis in recent history, with global impacts, caused the deaths of 50 million people, when a savage El Niño-related event occurred in 1878. We know the damage the climate can do when it turns against us.
Over recent decades the scientific community has reached an overwhelming consensus on the basis of virtually irrefutable evidence that:
- The large-scale burning of fossil fuels and the resulting emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere causes a dangerous rise in global temperatures.
- Significant changes of climate result from this, impacting the planet’s natural weather, ecological and environmental systems.
- It was known that these impacts would become increasingly harmful and eventually threaten human and animal existence.
Scientists at ExxonMobil knew this in the 1970s but the company concealed it.
The evidence
Changes in carbon dioxide level and global temperatures are monitored by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association:
The ten warmest years in the last 175 have all occurred during the last decade to 2024. Attribution science confirms the extent to which the climate has already warmed compared to earlier years.
Current experience, worsening year by year, varies in different parts of the world:
- More frequent and more intense heat waves, drier foliage, more frequent, much larger wildfires, and widespread droughts.
- More frequent and more powerful storms and hurricanes.
- More frequent and intense flooding.
- Milder, wetter winters, glaciers, and ice sheets diminishing rapidly.
- Increased droughts and desertification, rivers and water sources drying up, and agriculture impacted.
- Warmer oceans, decline of coral, and migration of fish species.
Recent examples are:
- Torrential rainfall and flooding in Valencia, Spain in 2024 (238 deaths).
- 14 destructive wildfires in Southern California in 2025 (31 deaths, over 400 indirect deaths, 90,000 square miles burned).
- Five successive extended and unprecedented heat waves across Europe in summer 2026, with thousands of heat-related deaths, hundreds of thousands of people evacuated or losing their homes and livelihoods, and vast areas turned into a burnt cinder.
- Huge wildfires in Canada.
Climate change denial
Amongst the scientific community, there has been virtually no dissent from that general analysis. But populist and right-wing politicians and their supportive media and think tanks continue to deny it or deny any urgency for responding to it.
But the evidence has accumulated, the urgency of the situation has been widely disseminated, and been largely accepted by governments and institutions everywhere, with the glaring exception of Trump’s US administration.
The evidence is visibly experienced, examined and reported every day, and populations are aware. But much media reporting fails to identify that the climate change being experienced is actually caused by human use of fossil fuels. There remains widespread climate denial in many newspapers, as the Guardian reports:
“Analysis of coverage of the June heatwave in Britain – remember, the one that claimed some 2,200 lives – found that of 2,500 articles in the mainstream media, 72 per cent made no mention of global warming or climate change”.
Climate change impacts
Without mitigation, CO₂ levels could reach 550 ppm by mid-century, doubling pre-industrial concentrations and intensifying climate impacts.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of the United Nations, in a recent report, highlighted the risks that as world temperatures increased, so-called tipping points would be reached, causing sudden, immense, irreversible, and calamitous upheavals in the climate and the environment. The regular five- or seven-yearly El Niño and La Niña weather cycles, and the Gulf Stream (part of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, or AMOC), would be exaggerated by global warming, massively and negatively impacting human environmental conditions.
Ocean levels, ocean currents, ice sheets, coral, fish, rivers, forests, glaciers, permafrosts, Arctic and Antarctic land masses, and frequency of tornados and hurricanes, would all be impacted by these factors, acting and reacting interdependently, driven by planetary warming.
Food production, and many other essential livelihoods, would be drastically impacted by global warming and all the associated climate impacts. This year’s heatwaves in the UK have reduced wheat yields by one third according to one farmer interviewed.
United Nations
The United Nations has been at the forefront of organising the science, disseminating the policy analyses, and urging, through its annual COP meetings and other initiatives, the adoption of mechanisms to deal with the climate change threat.
The most important (COP21) was in 2015, when the Paris Accord, a legally binding international treaty, was adopted by 196 Parties. Nations agreed in a shared commitment to limit global warming to “well below 2°C” above pre-industrial levels, with an aspirational goal of limiting the temperature increase to 1.5°C. That increase currently stands at around 1.3-1.6°C (by some estimates, 2.5°C in Europe).
The main mechanism for achieving this brake on global warming is the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) – non-binding national climate plans that detail emission reduction and adaptation goals. Each country prepares, communicates, and maintains annual NDCs to reflect its climate ambitions and actions, which are then formalised into national legislative frameworks, operational policy instruments, and actionable national policies.
In addition to the NDCs, agreements at COP meetings have included financial help for poorer nations, and carbon budgeting.
COP30, in 2025, at Belém in Brazil, as reported by Kings College, London, saw progress on climate finance, adaptation, and the just transition. But it also exposed the widening gap between what climate scientists consider the climate crisis requires in terms of protecting humanity, and what governments are prepared to agree to. It revealed the stark reality that, after 30 COPs, the world still cannot and will not agree on or implement a successful collective plan to phase out the fossil fuels that are driving the crisis.
So, the crisis continues to worsen.
Climate activists have long called COP meetings a farce due to the presence of so many fossil fuel lobbyists (1,773 attended COP29). Several large countries have long opposed the naming of fossil fuels as the cause of climate change, including Turkey, Saudi Arabia, China, India, and Russia. The USA did not send a delegation to Belem, although several individual states did.
The UN’s Global Stock Take in 2023 concluded that:
“Progress has been made towards the Paris Agreement goals, reaching near-universal climate action… these efforts are, however, insufficient and the world is not on track to meet the long-term goals of the Paris Agreement.”
According to UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Executive Secretary Simon Stiell: “Without this UN-convened global cooperation, we’d be headed towards five degrees of global warming.”
Vital transition work is being done by many governments, which is moderating the rise in emissions, but it is insufficient to prevent a looming catastrophe for the human race.
Lack of climate action is a political choice
Over 40% of the world’s population is represented by the six governments named above who are actively opposed to phasing out the use of fossil fuels, or to making sufficient transitional arrangements to facilitate that process. According to the Economist Intelligence Unit, 55% of the world’s population live in countries governed by authoritarian or near-authoritarian governments. Of the remaining 45%, only 6.6% are governed by full democracies.
Residents of democratic countries vote to control climate change, and governments respond, in theory at least. The power base of most autocratic governments is the economy, and energy in all its forms. This power base consists of corporations, large finance houses, and wealthy individuals (oligarchs) whose interests lie in maintaining the status quo, which is unhealthily linked to continued ownership, operation, transport, and use of fossil fuels.
If all countries were functioning democracies, the climate crisis would have been resolved by now. No one voluntarily chooses their own demise, and the transition would proceed apace. The ruling dictators and oligarchs and their self-serving supporters have a different mindset, although China is a complicated case where ‘green authoritarianism’ prevails, and the green transition is balanced with economic growth objectives. Their continuing power and wealth are so important to them that they strive, and are currently succeeding, in delaying and preventing the transition away from fossil fuels. They are completely responsible for the climate crisis we will all continue increasingly to face, and the UN’s efforts have been effectively hobbled.
This is now a war to the death: Us versus Them.
As UK Green Party Leader Polanski said, “The sheer scale of the devastation is hard to comprehend… We need to look it in the face because this is only a taster of what’s to come if we don’t act now.”
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